Three for all
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 32: Wicked Problems, Exquisite Dilemmas
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tony Barrell (dec.)
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Tony Barrell’s biography and other articles by this writer
FROM the three bears and wise men to the enduringly mundane ‘sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’, the neat and weighty triple has for centuries been the choice for a multitude of individuals, religions, lobbies and interest groups to package and sell their ideas. Literary, cultural, philosophical and political strategies are made to seem more substantial, ruses and conceits more respectable, inevitable even, as if ordained by the mysterious appeal of the ‘perfect’ number.
In ancient Sanskrit there were only three numbers – one, two and many – and it seems we are still not hardwired to understand anything more complex than three of anything, any more than we are born with the ability to read and write or play cricket. Long numbers are a cultural construct that has to be taught and learned. Moreover, the number three (the biggest a babe can recognise) seems to be imbued with mystical properties: if a whole is in three parts, each third expressed as a decimal is 0.33333 recurring, a number that that has no end. We can only count up to three but isn’t it encouraging to know it includes infinity?
In 2004 Peter Gordon, a behavioural scientist at Columbia University, published a paper that declared us to be innately innumerate. He had been living with a small Brazilian tribe, the Piraha, whose concept of numbers was also ‘one, two, many’. They had no written language and could not use their fingers for counting. Gordon decided that the rest of us probably would be the same if we weren’t taught the words for numbers greater than three – human comprehension of number is linguistic.
So, the rhythmic resolution of the three-part list, the seductive appeal of the metaphorical triangle, the symmetrical trio, the mysterious trinity are imbued with the allure of paradox. Three defines our conceptual limitations but points to limitless options beyond. It is the simpleton’s infinity. Thirds, triangles, trios and triples are natural links to deeper cosmic puzzles. Any third thing encourages our desire to burst out of the constraints of bifurcated reality – good/evil, up/down, wet/dry, left/right, then/now – that seems to be in
our DNA.
Then there’s the continuous recycling of the three-element joke that conflates choice to certainty. In the old Yiddish version: the world stands on three things – on money, on money and on money. Orson Welles was reported to have said that his favourite film directors were ‘the old masters’. When asked by the British critic Kenneth Tynan to identify them, he replied: ‘John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.’ The better to accept the singularity of a truth we are encouraged to imagine it threefold. The contemporary equivalent is location, location, location. Media traffic in threes is busier than bicycles in Amsterdam.
Any day of any week our attention is drawn to three key points, pillars, reasons – the construction is as essential to journalism as the three-act play is to drama, the three men who walk into a pub are to comedians or the trinity to Christians. Prime Minister Julia Gillard identified the problem when she accused her opponents of reducing their policies to ‘three-word slogans’ (like ‘stop the boats’). The Tea Party Movement loves them (TEA is an acronym for ‘taxed enough already’), as in: ‘lower taxes, less government, more freedom’. The only one I value is the old Hell’s Angels motto: three can keep a secret if two of them
are dead.
MOST RELIGIONS HAVE practices that relate to doing things three times. Muslims are supposed to wash before praying in a ritual known as wudu: hands, feet, face, all and each separately, three times. A pre-Christian rite performed on the longest day of the year sees some Greek women light small fires in the street, over which they jump three times, lifting up their skirts to feel the heat between their legs – a charm designed to promote fertility. At Greek Orthodox baptisms the infant is dunked into the font three times. It’s good form to throw three stones on a Mongolian burial mound, and a Christian cathedral is always consecrated three times with holy water. A friend told me that when she visited her ancestral home in Ghana, the elders insisted she be inducted by ritual cleansing, and so she was submersed in the local river three times – on three separate occasions. And we all know about third time lucky.
There’s something else going on that even connects cultural traditions of seeing things in groups of three, or preferring a third option, that could explain the connection between Buddhism – routinely described as one of the world’s ‘three great religions’ and itself packed with many three-based precepts – and the thoughts of Chairman Mao. Buddhism has ‘three treasures’ – the Buddha, the Buddhist law and the Buddhist priesthood – and for liturgical complexity you can’t beat Buddhism’s three kinds of three-part time (past, present and future in the past; past, present and future in the present and past; present and future in the future), or for simplicity its claim to be the ‘middle’ or ‘third’ way to enlightenment. Even the Buddha’s lotus position formed an isosceles triangle, its apex at that spot in the middle of the forehead where the ‘third eye’ was supposed to be, while the base was the line between the knees of his folded legs.
The Communist Party of China as led by Mao used Buddhist-style three-part mottos and slogans. In the early 1950s it identified ‘three evils’: corruption, waste and bureaucracy, all of which were to be eradicated by ‘the three antis’. The Great Leap Forward was launched with a campaign under ‘three banners’. Much later Deng Xiaoping devised three ‘benefits’ to allow the development of capitalism and market practices within the state-governed structure, whereby anything ‘beneficial’ to the Chinese economy must be ‘socialist’ including letting favoured enterprises rip, encouraging consumerism and maintaining one-party state control.
I don’t think he ever admitted to it, but maybe Tony’s Blair strategy to reconfigure Britain’s New Labour as the ‘third way’ (somewhere between socialism and capitalism) might also owe something to Buddhism. After all it was invented in the afterglow of New Age rave culture.
The Third Way’s main protagonists, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell, formed a pragmatic trinity – not so holy, and hardly Buddhist, but I expect the natural seeming order of a trio would have had resonance for them. Trinities are deeply embedded in western culture. The legendary Greek bard Orpheus supposedly said, ‘all things were made by god in three names’ – meaning the celestial trinity of sun, moon and earth. Perhaps all our trinities derive from the celestial order of ancient Egypt, when Osiris Isis and their offspring Horus ruled heaven and earth.
For Christians the difficult abstraction (and physical fact) of God in three persons is the ineffable mystery which makes their belief system so powerful and mysterious. Most theologians are reluctant to explain it too well and it is rejected as heretical by Islam, which believes only in one unitary God. Easier to understand are the holy family of Jesus, Joseph and Mary, the Three Wise Men who came to visit them and the trio of ideals in the Catholic Catechism: faith, hope and charity.
We can only guess from which of all these three-based traditions emerged the subconscious of the three wise men of New Labour but, while it lasted, they were determined to take advantage of whatever latent potency the Third possessed in western culture. It’s worth remembering that the post-hippy era also gave us the quasi-religious mind-body-spirit movement.